Just a little bit every day

28 September, 201030 September, 2010

Another day, another train trip

And so I’m back on the Eurostar today. With a couple of quiet hours, it seemed a good chance to take stock of what needs to be done in the next couple of days to get this site online, so I’ve started pulling out chunks of code that will become PHP includes, stole the code for the contact form from Minim Media and have built a new page for social media links. So I think that, barring the video page which may be scrapped, pretty much all the content is in place now – huzzah!

Looking ahead, tomorrow I think I need to focus on getting the PHP bits and pieces working – the includes, forms, highlighting menu items, etc. I think that’s the biggest thing. Plus, to go with that, I need to determine how I’m going to identify the various pages as belonging to a particular section. I guess I could just include a variable in each page – it would be nice and clear, but I’ve also been considering whether it might not be easier just to divide up the content into folders and identify the section by folder name from the URL. The problem with this may be one of longevity. There was an article on URL-naming that was referenced from our course materials for the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices course I took earlier this year which I think I may need to re-read – its premise was that addresses of pages should relate directly to what they are about and not reference filetypes, technical approaches or current-but-possibly-unsustainable filing systems. The idea is to end up with a URL that can be used for that content forever – if the page’s focus changes, then it needs a new URL which reflects that. I like the idea of this, that the address for something is permanent because there is no need for it to change – it means that other sites can link with confidence, and archives can be maintained without the need for ever renewing links. So I’ll be re-reading that, I think, and I’ll see what is feasible to implement right now.